Our bulding: Bolshaya Morskaya 11 in 1970

In the middle of the XVIII century the land on the which the house was built was occupied by a temporary palace of Empress Elizabeth. After dismantling of the palace there were the royal kitchens and the Throne Hall. The Throne Hall was then given to sculptor E. Falcone for work on the monument to Peter the Great also know as the ‘Bronze Horseman’. Falcone moved here in 1766 & he rebuilt the building which housed the former palace kitchen. He set up a scaffold for his work in the yard. In 1773, Falcone was visited by his friend the french philosopher Diderot, he stayed in the house until 1778, when he returned to France.

After the departure of the French the site housed a warehouse of marble for the construction of a number of buildings which gave rise to the naming of the laneway at the side of the bulding: Kirpichny (brick) lane. In 1801 the site owned by a merchant, the Prussian consul in St. Petersburg, when a residential two-storey house was built. In 1822 his heirs divied the land in two, the side adjacent to the Bolshaya Morskaya Street in 1836 was sold to architect Paul Jaco who designed many historical buildings in St. Petesburg.

In the years 1837-1838 Jaco built the current four-story building. Iron girders were used in the construction of first floor windows – an innovation in the local civil engineering. In 1842 Faberge started his business with the openning of a workshop in the basement. During the 1860s Chief Marshal Count Ivan M. Tolstoy lived in hosue Jaco, who had been former Senator and Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, a member of the State Council. Jaco house remained in the his family until 1917. In the 1930s the kirpichny (brick) lane end of the house become the ‘House of Artists’, or an artists commune.